(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 532: Normal is Not Correct, Someone Died Here

This week I’m joined by Kevin Krizek and Tila Duhaime to chat about an idea called Emergency Streets which focuses on the proper response from cities after a fatal crash. We chat about traffic deaths as an epidemic, and how an Emergency Streets protocol could alert people to the traffic deaths happening in their communities.

Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA and find it forever in our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: Kevin Krizek and Tila Duhaime, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Tila Duhaime: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? We’ll start with Tela, and then we’ll go with Kevin.

Tila Duhaime: Okay, sure. I started out as a lawyer in New York City doing intellectual property law. I loved it, did litigation and things, but I decided to leave the firm when it turned out that it was gonna be mostly working for big pharma and big auto perhaps. And I had been, I. A little bit acquainted with Transportation Alternatives in New York City.

It’s a huge bike and transit pedestrian advocacy organization, and they ended up hiring me in 2006 to be a community organizer and work on some urban planning efforts, which turned into not the first protected bike lanes, but the first protected bike lanes on the upper west side of Manhattan. And so I learned a whole lot about how the sausage is made when [00:03:00] trying to reconfigure roadways, when trying to do public outreach, when trying to get stakeholders to the table and get them to think about their streets in a different way.

And it was really energizing work. So I’ve been, since then in, now I live in Boulder, but I’ve been in various ways, always an advocate, sometimes lawyer. Sometimes a community organizer and just an agitator. I just finished up eight years as a, an appointed official for the City of Boulder on their transportation advisory board, and I’ve also been working with Kevin and other, a couple other professors at the university here in Boulder lecturing about traffic safety.

Jeff Wood: Kevin, we had you on at episode 376 with David King to talk about your book, but maybe you could share a little bit about yourself as well.

Kevin Krizek: Yeah. Which was great. Thanks Jeff. It’s wonderful to be back. Kevin Kreek, I’m a professor of environmental design at the University of Colorado Boulder, where for the past 30 years or so, I’ve been studying how transportation services are provided in communities.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. And Tila, give us a little bit of background, and I ask this of guests all the time. I’m wondering if working with transportation alternatives, the first inkling that you were interested in transportation policy? [00:04:00] I.

Tila Duhaime: Probably the first time I thought about it is transportation policy.

Yes. But I also, I’m originally from Southern California and I never learned how to drive until my mid thirties. So I biked and walked everywhere. I also hitched drives with my, teenage friends. But being able to see the southern California landscape for what it is for the car-centric, snobbish underserved by any other public transit area that is, has been really important to me in terms of just an equity lens, especially in California, there’s a lot of stigma against using public transit, except for in Northern California where BART is the thing.

And to move to New York City where it was, just. Everyone walked and everyone rode the subway and everyone used the bus. It was so much more egalitarian. And so that really opened my eyes to how different transportation policy could make in a societal sense, really level. A lot of the playing field, a lot of the social inequalities are not as apparent when you’re living in a dense city with actual options for different kinds of ways to get around.

So my work at For Transportation Alternatives started on their car free Central Park [00:05:00] campaign. So just trying to get motor vehicles off of that simple loop road. There was a mirror campaign for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. And so that was predominantly an equity issue for me, was being able to have a safe place for cyclists and runners to be, that wasn’t finally car dominated.

And it was, 20 year project, not of my making, but I helped, shove the boulder a little bit further up the hill.

Jeff Wood: And Kevin, since we last chatted, I wonder if there’s anything that’s influenced you or pushed you in a certain direction?

Kevin Krizek: I think hugely, Jeff, I was fortunate to receive a fellowship to go serve as a senior advisor in the state department in Washington dc And so I lived, breathed, drank, listened to everything, Washington, DC while there for 12 months, and it was really eye-opening in a number of respects.

Prominent among them was the fact that I’ve realized how disconnected we are from our virtue signaling and what our. Real policies are.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Kevin Krizek: And where and how and why does that affect the stuff that I’ve been studying so intently and where have we just fallen off the radar? [00:06:00] So that was a really eyeopening, almost a watershed moment in my, it was definitely a watershed moment in my career to have that kind of realization and listen to how often we talk about things and really don’t act on things.

Jeff Wood: Another thing that’s interesting from that perspective that you’re just talking about, it just in my mind is just like the difference between what people care about and what they elevate or what they promote. I’m just thinking about social media specifically. There’s all these folks who have the big cult of personality and there are people who are promoting different things, but I.

The things that a lot of people care about aren’t necessarily those big ideas, and they do care about them, but maybe not the same level as maybe something that’s happening in their local community. But those are the things that get the attention and those are the things that get given a bullhorn to have this larger discussion nationally when there’s all these other things under the surface that are going on that people care about, but the things that get all the attention are up here and don’t really connect with what people really are caring about locally.

Kevin Krizek: Yeah, that was definitely front and center. There was all sorts of talk about what we [00:07:00] should be doing at the highest level of US government, but then while I was working there, there were actually two State Department employees who were killed on their bikes, on their way to work. One of them, I passed that intersection every morning, and just the way that those kind of issues were just.

This is another one we lost of our, army of civil servants and it was like Hill Street blues. Guys, let’s just be careful out there for younger folks. Maybe you could explain that reference

Tila Duhaime: even I need that explained.

Kevin Krizek: It was one of those seventies shows where the cops would all get together and they would all break out before going out on their assignments, out on their beats.

And the chief, I forget his name, he said, remember guys, let’s be careful out there,

Jeff Wood: just like a catch phrase at the end of the show. Yep. Before we get started, I wanna tell a story, and I don’t usually do this on the show, but I thought this was pertinent to what we’re gonna talk about. I don’t believe I’ve told this story on the show.

We’ve done so many episodes. I sometimes forget what I’ve said and what I haven’t said. But when I was in high school, the day before track meets, I ran track and cross country and high school and college, and the day before [00:08:00] Track meets my teammates and I would go out to dinner and get ready for the next day as I was driving a teammate home one night.

We came across the scene of a crash and a driver had been speeding, and something happened such that the car flipped over. And as I saw the car, it was upside down and empty. The driver was killed. And the driver was actually one of my teammates.

And I went home and I called my coach and I woke him up to tell him the news.

And then I wanted to go on a run. I wanted to leave the house. I wanted to disappear. I was upset that my friend had passed away. My parents wouldn’t let me go. And they wouldn’t let me outta the house. I often ran to dull pain. Running was my coping mechanism and it’s probably best that they didn’t let me out ’cause I probably would’ve tried to go back to the scene and observe what was happening.

It probably would’ve been worse, but I wanted to tell you all that story because that scene, I can remember it in my head. I see it right now in my mind. And it makes all these discussions we had on the show about collisions and traffic deaths and everything real. And I’m sure many people listening have had these types of [00:09:00] experiences, which is part of the problem.

And we just mentioned, this is an epidemic and everyone is involved, but it’s not really treated as one. Everybody’s had this experience, but we’re all trying to run away from it to dull the pain. Like I wanted to do it that same night. And I wanna know, since traffic violence is this national epidemic, why don’t we treat it like the health emergency that it actually is?

Tila Duhaime: Yeah, there are so many whys behind that. Part of it is just the sort of the incremental shift in safety approaches. In the 1970s there were a lot of traffic deaths as well, but from very different causes than what we see right now. So we’ve seen a lot of engineering shifts and changes and those were a response to a specific identified subset of the problem.

The driver and the passenger were killed because the car exploded in flames because, the chassis was insufficiently strong to avoid a puncture in the, so now our chassis are much stronger and now rollover crashes are not as fatal as they used to be because we have, as a society parceled out responsibility for [00:10:00] micromanaging a CA certain portion of the problem that feels like progress. But without realizing that the larger picture there is just multiple other moles that are popping up, that are still contributing. And in the meantime, our vehicles, because they are safer and engineering has improved, they go faster than ever before.

Zero to 68 speeds are much faster than before. Overall travel times. You can’t imagine getting here from Boulder to the local ski area. It can take an hour and 28 minutes now, and it surely took a lot longer than that 30 years ago. So we have prioritized speed in the name of efficiency and in the name of progress. While handling at a very small and insignificant level, individual causes of death in the overall car crash problem, without recognizing that we are really not even treading water. The tide is, I don’t know, maybe it’s a stream, but there’s some water analogy there.

Speaker 4: Yeah,

Tila Duhaime: and we are just trying different boats and different crafts and different oars, but the stream is swiftly carrying us in the wrong [00:11:00] direction.

And of course, we’ve seen that recently with a lot more emphasis or exposure by vulnerable road users to people outside of the cars who don’t benefit from the. Seat belt, anti-lock baking, anti rollover technology are bearing, evermore brunt of the problem. And it’s harder to engineer a human being to withstand these sorts of things.

Kevin Krizek: Jeff, I would say that there’s three other quick things. There’s many, but we have tolerated a risk and undue risk in society, and we are basically forced to accept that risk now. And so everybody collectively. Is aware of this risk. But ever since the seventies we’ve been tolerating it and we, I think we tolerate more of it now these days in terms of like, why do we tolerate that risk?

We’re conditioned to it, but also we think that we need to tolerate it for efficiency of commerce. And that’s a big. A lot of people are saying we should not be slowing down our roads in the name of commerce. And that’s a [00:12:00] big kind of question mark. And then the third is, most people have just swept this in the direction of the transportation agencies.

The transportation agencies are hamstrung in how they can deal with this. When Covid came around, it was all hands on deck. Yes, the CDC played a prominent role, but they reached out to everybody and all their kind of partner agencies. When people hear about a public health epidemic of this nature, first of all, they say, huh, epidemic traffic.

No, I don’t, I, we don’t see it. Even though it has, roughly the same numbers as most of the other epidemics that we see, but they say, oh, the DOT is gonna take care of that. Public works ought to do something about this.

Jeff Wood: And we chatted with Kerry Watkins and David Editor about their safe systems pyramid research.

And the thing that struck me from that was just the explanation of kinetic energy and speed and what that means for the human body and how that should be what we look at when we’re trying to figure out how to solve this problem.

Kevin Krizek: Yeah, we couldn’t agree with you more, and that’s basically the premise of the prescription that [00:13:00] we’re offering.

Tila Duhaime: So we’re banding around, we’re into like prescription and epidemic and I just wanna make clear, I don’t see that as hyperbole. It’s not just. A catchphrase or a way to describe it or analogize it, it is truly a public health emergency where you’re seeing the same number of people dying every year on US roadways that we saw at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties.

And that was a peak that was addressed through, a vast public health effort research into, treatment for drugs, for prevention, and for treatment of the progression of the disease. It was a landmark moment, really for the FDA for. Fast tracking certain drugs that seemed like they had promise and we’re not really fast tracking anything here, but we are at epidemic levels and I’m just talking about people dying.

There are 5, 6, 7 times as many people being badly injured, their lives forever altered and we have become, yeah, in endured to the threat, it’s a little bit alike. The frog in the sauce pan, like it’s just slowly getting worse. And we’re, we’ve made it through last year. We made it through the year before.[00:14:00]

But you’re right almost all of us know someone personally who was killed or badly injured in traffic violence. And if we did that for, a communicable disease, if we accepted that for wildlife, attacks, if there were mountain land attacks killing six people a year in a city like Boulder, we would definitely be doing something different about it.

Jeff Wood: Why aren’t the past approaches working? We have widening roads to let people speed a little bit more ’cause there’s history that people think safe cutting down street trees for clear zones admonishing repeat beating offenders with slaps on the wrist. Why aren’t some of these previous things working at reducing speed or at least reducing collisions in traffic deaths?

Kevin Krizek: Jeff, we have created ever since the 1920s, you know this as well as anyone else, and inherently. Dangerous system.

That inherently dangerous system has been reinforced through M-U-T-C-D through aashto, through ITE trip generation, through all these different manuals and guidance and design books. We’re we basically, no pun intended, [00:15:00] cemented ourself into a system where it has a number of different. Anomalies from what a European city would look like in terms of like where we choose to slow down traffic, where people live, right?

And we don’t have that kind of system of checks and balances culturally that the Europeans do.

And so for this reason, I think we have inherited an incredibly problematic system that we’re slapping bandaids on every year. And we are misguided to continue to think that we’re gonna slap bandaids through. Solutions of technology suit through solutions of enforcement, through solutions of whatever, when all the trends are moving in the opposite directions.

And so without a kind of recognition, a full on recognition that this inherent system that we have basically been conditioned to accept is flawed from the outset. That’s what we need to kind of address. And that’s why I think we have seen such marginal successes in [00:16:00] past efforts.

Tila Duhaime: I’d also like to point out the role of uniquely American individualism and freedom ideas tied up in driving and the idea not just that there’s no like moral high ground to living in a city versus in a rural area, versus some suburban, place.

People choose and feel free to choose and entitled to choose different kinds of things that they want. I want a yard for the kids with a swing set. And there’s a loss of recognition of what those choices impose, that those costs are imposing on neighbors, other people in your community.

And in particular, there’s no sense that it is inappropriate to be driving a large vehicle near your neighbor’s house. Or that it should not necessarily be, every road in a city should not necessarily be accepting a, an 18 wheel rig or, a large vehicle that, we have conceded is necessary and useful for interstate commerce.

But does that mean that it needs to get every single place in America? And there’s a little bit of a loss of [00:17:00] communal thinking about this. I think a lot of people who live on cul-de-sacs still have some of that. This is our street. Don’t drive through here. This is kids are playing in the street, but for the most part, if you’re, in a town and in a city, the street outside is not yours.

Maybe that parking spot right there might be yours

Jeff Wood: or you think it’s yours, even if it isn’t,

Tila Duhaime: you think it’s yours, even if it’s not. Yeah. But there’s no further thinking about why is it inappropriate to be able to even be able to drive 50 miles an hour if you’re misbehaving? There’s no thought that the, there’s something wrong with the roadway, if that’s even possible.

Jeff Wood: I’m interested in this psychology too. In some of the papers and research that you sent me, Kevin, you know there’s individualism, there’s others, and there’s fatalism. Some of the things that we need to overcome in order to get to a point where we’re fixing some of these problems.

Kevin Krizek: That’s where most of the attention has been.

It’s been focusing on individual behavior, individual driver education. If we can just correct the way that these people are acting, performing, doing whatever [00:18:00] they’re doing on the system, then we’re gonna be in a much better spot. And yes, that’s true. However, again, to my earlier point, those people have been trained or conditioned to operate with a lot of air on a broken system.

Tila Duhaime: And the engineers have been trained to build the roadways that those people expect.

Kevin Krizek: And so what we’re trying to do here is put more emphasis, frame things more in terms of the inherently problematic system, and being able to lean into that problem is gonna get us more movement on the needle.

Tila Duhaime: So I would say, Kevin, that we’re not I don’t imagine Emergency Streets is really trying to highlight the problematic nature of the system.

I think a lot of the people we’re talking to are members of the choir and we’re singing to them. But what is different about Emergency Streets is to say, look, we can remove any investigation and assignment of blame for a given fatal crash. And simply address it as too much speed happened in this collision.

Too much kinetic energy was released here, [00:19:00] and the human body can only withstand so many, forces at once. And so as a response, we’re going to reduce the kinetic energy that’s possible to introduce into a crash in this location by reducing speed. That’s how we’re reducing the kinetic energy. It makes the kinetic energy sort of the source of infection.

Jeff Wood: So maybe you could tell us a little bit what the idea of Emergency Streets is so people kinda get an understanding of the implementation of this idea that would address that kinetic energy as the problem.

Tila Duhaime: Yeah. If we could just all be better drivers and more careful all the time everywhere, the world would be a better place, right?

And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong in thinking that the source is just in the education and training and oh, if only people realize the risks that they’re imposing. And so to try to undo. Or sidestep some of that thinking. What we propose is that after a fatal and or serious injury crash on a roadway in a municipality, and that could be a county, it could be a city, it could be a large town that [00:20:00] every driver that’s going through that area within a half mile radius of the fatal crash for about two weeks after the crash should be required to slow down by about 20 miles an hour.

Significantly the kinetic energy that their car is introducing into the system. And I’m not saying we do this by enforcement or signage or pretty pleases. We have a good arsenal I think, of mobile. Tactical, readily deployable. Mobile infrastructure that we can put out there are construction barrels.

These are a lot of things that you see at a work site, on a highway or on a major road. So barrels, bollards, barricades, different ways that direct drivers usually into a more constrained space than they’re used to encountering on this road. That is coupled with an expectation for lower speeds, usually just with signage, but we are suggesting that we be a little bit more aggressive on the temporary engineering front [00:21:00] so that these designs are both self enforcing and self obvious, and they don’t require someone standing out there for 12 hour shifts holding a, 35 mile an hour.

Please sign. And we think that would accomplish a couple of different things. On Monday afternoon a student at the high school here was involved in a two car crash on a fairly major intersection just outside of the town limits. I think it’s technically in county. And her car was wrapped around a hole.

She died. I happened to have to go that route to pick up my son from school, and it happened after I picked him up on Monday. By the time I took him on Tuesday morning, I had not yet heard of the crash, and I had passed by the scene and had no idea that had happened. And by Tuesday afternoon there was a makeshift memorial at the pole.

So there’s signs and pictures from flowers and sometimes that happens, but that’s not gonna stay forever. And to me this is emblematic of a major problem in our thinking about what the proper response by a [00:22:00] community, by a municipality to be after a fatal crash. And that is get the evidence, put some paint, down little orange X marks to a, the the onsite investigative team that will come at some point in the next day or two, but in the meantime, clean up the detritus, get everything moving back the way that it was when the way that it was just killed someone.

There was no indication there was an extraordinary amount of speed. There was no. We’re still waiting on the investigative reports, but I don’t really care what the investigative report shows. I think if both of those drivers have been going more slowly, that the crash would’ve been easier to avert and if it had occurred, it would’ve been less likely to be deadly.

And I think that’s true system-wide. I can’t necessarily point to this crash or that crash, but we do know that if we slow these things down, that’s likely overall in the aggregate to improve the state of affairs. Without focusing on and without interrupting all of the other efforts that are happening on the safe systems approach, on education, on engineering, and whatever you’d like.

But it [00:23:00] says that normal is not correct and it alerts drivers coming through the area for two whole weeks that someone died here because maybe mistakes were made maybe, I don’t know. But we need to slow down here because it was enough that someone died.

Kevin Krizek: We know that we, like I mentioned, have a number of issues that we’re trying to wrestle with, and we are, as a society, trying to recreate the system that we have, even though we know that system is problematic.

So what is the proper response? That’s the question that we’re asking communities to have a better answer towards. How do we get past the blame game, and how do we actually rectify a system in concert with ways that we know have worked in the past?

Jeff Wood: It’s so different than what, say like we’ve had an elevation of knowledge about plane crashes lately.

And the NTSB and what happens after, that you go looking for the black box, you start to figure out what’s going on. [00:24:00] Plane crash deaths are not tolerated. It’s gonna take down the whole system if allow this to continue to snowball into more and more deaths. But we treat traffic deaths differently.

And you all are basically saying and setting up a system that allows. Car crashes to be more like plane crashes or more like other things that we take more seriously. And it doesn’t seem like it’s too onerous on a city to come in with some barrels and ballards and stuff like that and set something up to let people know that this happened.

And so I just think back to here in San Francisco where we had a situation where four people two parents and two children were killed. When they were just trying to go to the zoo, they were sitting at the bus stop and a car came through and basically, wiped the, A driver came through and wiped them out.

There’s another problem there, is the language A driver came through and wiped them out and then, the city decided to, get on it and, put together a plan for figuring out. And then the merchants came and said, we don’t like this. It’s not enough parking. It is not gonna allow people to get to our shops.

And so I’m [00:25:00] thinking about, the way we should be responding to these things like we do other. Disasters, but also what’s in the way of it? What continues to get in the way of doing the things that people who are listening to this podcast probably believe we sh and you all should believe we should do, versus folks that are, not in that same frame of mind.

Kevin Krizek: This is one of the reasons why we feel as if the two week period is important, because what it does is it allows us to conduct that investigation at the highest scale. What does that investigation look like? That investigation looks like we slowed traffic down and the sky didn’t fall. Commerce still got to where it needed to go.

Yeah. And we were able to move on. But on a more detailed level, Jeff, say for example, the role of street design and facilitating unnecessarily high speeds, or the likelihood that specific design interventions could have prevented that crash. And so we could send out an army of people that would do, not necessarily an Army, but the Vision Zero coordinator could go out there with a checklist and say, here’s our audit.

How are we doing in terms of this? We do the crash investigation and we have [00:26:00] extremely detailed procedures for that in terms of assigning blame and liability, but we do not do a good job of understanding the degree to which the inherent street design may have been a contributing factor to this, and this is where cities are growing.

A little bit of discomfort with this is because they don’t feel comfortable saying Our streets are dangerous.

Jeff Wood: They don’t wanna let people know. They wanna just have everything be peach keen.

Tila Duhaime: That, and they’ve relied on their expertise and the engineering judgment and the engineers are following these manuals.

And as long as everyone’s conforming to the standard of care, or the engineering standards that are across the United States accepted as normal, then they won’t get in trouble. But departing from that norm. Requires an extra level of justification.

Jeff Wood: It’s a legal kind of shield that they’re using.

Tila Duhaime: Lawyers do ruin a lot of stuff, and then it goes back again to why we’re like working on just reducing speed and not talking about blame and not [00:27:00] trying to demonize anything in particular about the roadway, the driver, the interaction who had too many drinks. Who wasn’t paying attention and just say, look, there was just too much speed in the system here.

There was too much kinetic energy at that intersection. At that collision. I think there’s a lot of ways to compare the number of people who are being killed to significant health crises that we’ve confronted in the past, but it takes a lot to overcome sort of the paradigm that this is normal, that this is just what’s expected. If we could view it like, a contagion in our water supply, then we would recognize as the government’s job to clean up the water supply. And that might mean short term measures boil your water at home, filter your water, do whatever. But they’re not gonna stop it there, right?

They’re gonna say we’re also gonna introduce, four more inline filtration systems and do extra cleaning and whatever in the meantime. And then we’ll continue to monitor and. That we’ll keep working on it until that water’s safe to drink. We don’t care who infected the water [00:28:00] supply.

That’s not an essential part of the investigation. It’s certainly not an essential part of responding to it and protecting the public health. And I think that having too much speed there’s something wrong with our system of roads, right? And whatever it is. It’s making dozens of people, maybe hundreds very sick and dying every year in almost every community.

And if we treat it like a contagion in the water supply, if we treat it like the danger of earthquakes or wildfires, and mitigate the risks of those things happening by in, by building codes, by better road design, by, ensuring that people clear brush around their homes or doing better forestry management, we can condition people to expect a government response to this.

I think is what I’m trying to say.

Kevin Krizek: Yeah. To your point, Jeff, of like, why are the governments having pause? I think that’s a really important question because if a water main breaks, we have perfect reason to expect that the city’s gonna divert or change the traffic configuration. Yep. If we’re gonna be upgrading this [00:29:00] intersection, they’re gonna be changing the traffic configuration.

If we have a fatality, we’re not gonna change the traffic configuration. Why,

Tila Duhaime: even if it was the third one on this same stretch of road in five years?

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting to see some of those statistics, right? Like they come out with the GIS maps of certain Florida roads that have the most crashes in the country, and you see these bright red lines on there and people know where they are.

It’s not like we don’t know where the dangerous spots are, and it’s not like we don’t know where, those can be impacted. I’m also interested in that earthquake idea too. Here I am in San Francisco and I just redid my basement, and the previous owners of this place had done some earthquake retrofitting the codes had been updated since they did their retrofit, and so we had to do more, right to upgrade the bracing for the house.

We had to put shear walls up. We had to. Anchor the shear walls to the slab. We had to put in bolting, we had to do this, that, and the other thing, and we get approved for it, and then we get a discount on our property taxes. If we made [00:30:00] that improvement

There’s a benefit to making that happen. And so I find that interesting in comparison with this idea of emergency streets because. The earthquake safety of places is important, and they have these codes that adapt to the knowledge that is existing at the time. And so why can’t we do that with streets? Why can’t we adapt to the knowledge that we’re gaining on the study of kinetic energy, of speed, of what interventions can actually help?

Kevin Krizek: I think we’ve met the enemy, and the enemy is us.

Most engineers, not all, most engineers are gonna think that they’re doing their job by enforcing the existing codes. They truly think that they’re making their roads safer by doing more of the same codes. Now we can talk to West Marshall, we can talk to others about that, right?

And if we look at most people and their driving behaviors, most people are gonna be relatively say, huh, why should I slow down because of something that somebody else did. And so that’s a collective action issue, right? We [00:31:00] collectively are having an inability to recognize the overall public costs that this is imposing on society.

And so the collective action issue really does require people to look in the mirror and say, am I a part of this problem?

Tila Duhaime: Yeah.

Kevin Krizek: And that’s, I think, an important issue as well.

Tila Duhaime: And Jeff, you raised earlier, so you’re interested in the psychology of this, and I think there’s another body of evidence that.

Tells us that humans are actually really terrible at understanding risks and at prioritizing risks. There’s so many parents here of kids who go to school that might be a reasonable walk or bike ride to school, but they don’t feel safe letting their kids do that because they have to cross X, Y, Z, busy street, and instead they feel better putting their kids in their own car and driving them there without contemplating that they’re.

Exacerbating for everyone else. The same problem that they’re trying to avoid for themselves. And yeah, I think a lot of people are generally careful drivers almost all the time, but speeding is okay [00:32:00] sometimes here and there or this stop sign makes no sense. No one would ever I can’t see anyone coming anyway.

And I’ll disregard this one ’cause I’m used to it.

And those levels of risk are Yes. They are still small. But when the risk comes to realization, the outcomes can be so catastrophic, and we are not good as humans at multiplying that at the cost of failure, at the cost of a mistake versus our everyday experience with making the same mistake probably without consequence.

Jeff Wood: It’s interesting how lately we’ve been talking more about risk. West Marshall’s book talks about it to a certain extent, but also just this whole discussion about. Climate change and the impacts on housing and the risk that the insurance companies are taking on, right? We’re hearing more about risk from that.

Auto insurance is going up and so that means basically that auto insurers are seeing the risk in more driving in larger vehicles, and they have higher repair costs, and so your insurance rates are gonna go up and it’s interesting how we compartmentalize the risk that [00:33:00] comes from, our insurance company telling us that our rates are going up versus like the risk that we’re internalizing as what’s safe for us to do on a daily basis.

Tila Duhaime: Yeah. And industry wide rates going up are really great example of why I should slow down just because some other jerk was going too fast.

Kevin Krizek: Yeah. There’s a whole systems thinking to all of this that is so absent to most kind of policy prescriptions.

Jeff Wood: It also makes me think, and this is one of my favorite things lately to think about anyways, is Mindy, full Love wrote a piece for nonprofit quarterly, a number of years ago, talking about the difference between the bio psychosocial model versus the biomedical model.

And it makes me think of that too as like, where’s the risk coming from or where’s the healing coming from specifically? And you know who can see whether you’re having a heart attack or not. If it’s your boss saying, oh, you look unwell, you should go to the hospital when you’re just sitting there versus the hospital, how they treat you when you get there.

It’s like an interesting kind of comparison between what happens when we look at things systemically versus what, when we look at things as just like that individual thing happened [00:34:00] and this is how we solve the individual thing. Yeah. That thing in the article was a heart attack, but it could be anything like a crash, right?

We’re there and we see what’s happening specifically with that individual crash versus thinking about it from a systemic level and looking at it from a larger perspective and thinking about those types of interventions that might help in a larger scheme or larger scale.

I’m interested also in, in like how you’re seeing some of the things that are happening and some of the good things that are happening.

I just saw that Sacramento has put together a program where they’re looking at doing something similar, not so fast, but months instead of years. They have a task force for their Vision Zero program that looks at crashes and heavy crash areas, seeks to think about making interventions. Have you seen what Sacramento’s put into place and is that, going in the right direction?

Or is it still not quite enough?

Kevin Krizek: I think that’s a great question. I haven’t looked into it in detail. I can only say that when we learn about these things in school, as you recall, you get the planning approach, which is, oh my gosh, wouldn’t world be great if cars didn’t exist, and we could have car-free streets.

And then you go over to the [00:35:00] civil engineering wing of campus and you say, our purpose is to move cars as swiftly as possible.

Now, where on that continuum is Sacramento’s prescription for their new plan? Are they willing to accept a reduction in the overall capacity of their car volume? Because most towns we’re not seeing that.

We’re seeing Vision Zero slapped on a system that is. Already at over capacity, and we’re doing this with signs and whatnot, right? So unless we take that engineering approach through the modification of streets, I think that is where the magic bullet is going to lie. And if Sacramento’s efforts are doing that, kudos to them.

Tila Duhaime: So I’ve talked to, a number of engineers who work on these kinds of traffic calming measures, and there’s often a pressure for them to deliver a street that operates just as efficiently as before. And they tend to look at, overall travel times from one end of a corridor to the other, [00:36:00] but ignoring, the extra six seconds of cycle delay at, one of the three intersections along that route, say, and I think that’s the right thing to be doing.

I think that constant travel at constant speed in urban areas, that’s an inappropriate expectation. And so to me, it’s not even so much about the, like the throughput or the travel time for a motor vehicle, as long as that average speed, like I would be happy to see the lights coordinated as long as they’re coordinated to optimize for 25 mile an hour traffic as opposed to letting people go 35, 42, 42, stop, wait.

Make up time. So assuming that these changes actually reduce the average speed at all times of day for the vehicles going through, yes, they’re doing the right thing. And if it’s not happening that way because they have to split the baby with the business, interests in town that are being noisy, then no, they’re not doing the right [00:37:00] thing.

Kevin Krizek: There’s a lot of splitting that goes on in Vision Zero stuff. Yeah, and I think. There’s enough evidence to suggest that, it’s a terrible metaphor, but we have been splitting the baby inappropriately.

Jeff Wood: I just looked at the Sacramento B article. I just wanted to read what they said in the article.

’cause I think it would be interesting to you all. With the council’s approval, the Department of Public Works will begin recruiting and hiring almost immediately for the 4.6 million quick build infrastructure program called Vision Zero Transportation Safety Team. The six person crew will design and implement targeted low cost and safety enhancing features within months.

Residents often wait years, even decades for improvements due to city’s reliance on grant funding. Otherwise. So I hope it’s like what you all are talking about, where they make real change instead of just putting up some signs. But it interesting. I just thought, given what you guys are talking about, I thought this was an interesting thing.

It just came up like a month ago. Some other stuff that’s been happening too is, the idea of families for safe streets trying to get speed limiters on cars, folks who are reckless drivers. Now there’s been a discussion, I’m interested in your thoughts on this discussion that Greg Shill brought to the forefront about, his [00:38:00] idea.

Thinking about specifically not focusing on street safety programs, I don’t necessarily believe on that street safety design stuff. And focusing heavily on the reckless drivers, on the folks who are creating crash situations. And so I’m curious if you read anything about that specifically and have some pushback on those ideas that we should be just focusing on the worst offenders versus what we’re doing is thinking about more design applications on streets to make things better.

Tila Duhaime: We’re at roughly 5 million motor vehicle crashes a year. 43,000. There’s probably about 40, 40,000 fatal crashes. Maybe a little less. ’cause some, there’re often, multiple fatalities that are in a crash. There are not that many reckless drivers. The drivers involved in those fatal crashes.

By and large, they don’t have a history of reckless driving. I just, I think that’s a lot of effort. To be fair, I’m impressed that the European Union, was requiring speed limiters on all cars sold. Now, [00:39:00] like if it if there was political will to do it, we could, we have the technology, I don’t disagree with families for safe streets, for I.

Impressing upon the public the, in the necessity of obeying speed limits, and maybe the same way we are focusing on fatal crashes for emergency streets. That’s the worst case scenario. Maybe they’ve chosen these reckless drivers as of the worst offenders. But in terms of practically, other than changing the paradigm about having a car that can go as fast as the driver wants it to go, they don’t see that it would have much practical effect.

Focusing on strictly on those really high volume reckless drivers. They are terrible. Yeah. It’s a tragedy when you read about these. There was a family in New York City and Queens, I think it was that. It was a mother and child who was killed maybe a month ago, and her older child survived the crash.

The driver had, a huge list of speed violations of parking violations. I believe that the driver had a restricted license at the time, was driving. Anyway, I. [00:40:00] But any of those drivers can borrow your car. They can do the same stuff in their mom’s car. They can do the same stuff in a rental car.

No, I don’t really think that’s a fruitful avenue to be pursuing.

Kevin Krizek: And furthermore, Jeff, what we’re trying to do is provide a momentum for accelerating a paradigm shift here. What is that paradigm shift? It’s almost like an alternative view of the world, an alternative view of what a transportation system should be providing in the first place.

So if we’re just trying to solve the issue of like, where are we gonna get the most bang for our buck in terms of a policy that’s gonna do this? Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that the bad driver long tail is where you should go. There’s a long tail of bad drivers. Old drivers, young drivers, reckless drivers, aggressive drivers, let’s attack them.

But that doesn’t really get at the larger paradigm shift of what we’re trying to encourage here.

Tila Duhaime: So by long tail you mean like the ends of the bell curve? The ends of the bell curve,

Jeff Wood: Yeah. I was thinking also about what we’ve seen with congestion pricing in New [00:41:00] York City and the amount of reduction in crashes, the reductions in particulate matter and the immediate.

Impact that it had. And I think that is really a big policy win just from the standpoint of being able to see that if you do something that works, it will actually have an immediate impact. And so I think about the things that you all are talking about along those same lines, if you can actually implement it.

Then people will see the impacts and then they’ll never know a way otherwise.

Tila Duhaime: I lived in New York City both before and after Bloomberg and Jeanette Sathan and so to see just that, she just went in and put in these protected bike lanes and she said, Nope, there we’re gonna turn all of, times square into a pedestrian thoroughfare and cars will just figure it out and drive around.

And they did. Travel times improved, crashes improved. Number of fatal incidents, decreased number of vulnerable road users increased. They were just [00:42:00] canaries in the coal mine, and she flushed them out and had the data to support that. This was a smart thing to do, not just a sensible thing to do, but the responsible government thing to do.

And I was working with some of the same staff of, on, on the transportation team, city staff, who before had just said no, and the sky will fall if we do this. And suddenly they were directed to do something very different and they were for the first time in their careers, some of them finally excited about doing the work that they were doing because they could point to some of these.

But it, yeah, it took a really strong policy leader. He said, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna count the numbers, and we’re gonna let the data speak for itself, but we’re not going to hold everything up because of all the what ifs.

Kevin Krizek: And furthermore, Jeff, you have a lot of readers or listeners who are, pseudo or real sistas, right?

And once you see the world through. Minimum parking requirements, you can’t see the world anywhere else. Can’t stop. And so the idea here is to provide this being, this [00:43:00] emergency streets being that kind of reckoning with our road system.

In the same way hopefully people will not see their road system in the same way and who gets priority and how, and why and where and stuff like that.

So really to accelerate those conversations, because right now there’s a lot of noise out there about how to solve this problem. And what we’re trying to do is increase that signal to noise ratio and say, this is where the surgical precision efforts should go.

Jeff Wood: I’m curious, you all have given presentations of this to numerous boards and cities and things like that, and I’m curious like what the response has been.

They’re like, oh yeah, that’s really cool, and then just ignore it the next day. Or what’s been is have, do you get pushback? Do you get people who are excited and they’re like, let’s implement this.

Tila Duhaime: All of the above. What often happens though is that, over a, over the course of a 45 minute or an hour presentation, we will hear some of the what ifs right at the beginning.

Oh, people will never do that. They’ll never put up with this. What if, how are you gonna let them know there’s gonna cause more crashes, blah, blah, blah. And. I don’t know, four out of five of [00:44:00] those by the end of our hour talk have come around and they don’t think it’s impossible. They certainly are more open to it than they were at the beginning.

Kevin Krizek: It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to think about how something would play out in the in an alternative universe. And what we’re trying to do is minimize that amount of work that it is for these people, right? And so you already do this. When you construct a road. You already do this when a water main breaks, why can’t you?

We do it in this particular situation, what’s holding us back? And it might be just like overall, like lack of vision here. And so we get a lot of nods of the affirmative. And then when it comes to actually what needs to change? They’re already chasing everything that they can chase because we’re trying to fix this with all these bandaids we just heard from someone from the Vision Zero efforts yesterday.

They’re so trying to instill a response to do what they’re doing, that they can’t have enough mind, space or resources to do something different.

We need to provide them with the framework. We need to provide them with the kind of kit, if you will, and we’re seeking funding to provide that kit. So if there are philanthropic donors out there, we’re thinking community, family foundations that are interested in this type of material, we would encourage ’em to get in touch with us because what we’re trying to do is ease the pain by which a city can do this.

Jeff Wood: So what does that look like? What does it look like when you put something, a program like this together and what does it need?

Tila Duhaime: So besides

Jeff Wood: money,

Tila Duhaime: It doesn’t need a lot of

Jeff Wood: money.

Tila Duhaime: So every city will have, some cash of bollards, barrels, redirecting devices, signage, that kind of thing, but it’s gonna look different in every city.

And so being able to assure that we have a minimum number of lane narrowing devices for a mile long stretch for let’s say a two four lane highway. Sort of road that’s on [00:46:00] the long, large end of what we would need. Smaller roadways where the target speed would be around 20 miles an hour.

Dropping it from 40 miles an hour, 35 miles an hour down to 20. There’s lots of other things that could be deployed that cities might not necessarily have. So there are mobile like speed humps. There’s mobile chicanes that you can put in place that would not be appropriate if you’re expecting cars to encounter them at 35 miles an hour.

But at 20 miles an hour would, and so those kind of lower end supplemental devices I think would probably be more frequently shown in the kit. And yeah, you can accomplish a lot with cones and flexible bollards and I think that we would be overdoing it for what would be considered a standard response today in a city for with a water main break.

Kevin Krizek: Point that really hasn’t surface us yet, Jeff, is the covid point, which is if we’re in a public health emergency like we were with Covid, it was all hands on deck resources flew diverted into new directions. A city manager can make the case that we’re in a public health emergency for this and [00:47:00] they can, I.

Say we wanna divert resources and rewrite job descriptions to address this, so therefore that would bring on more hands on deck from the public health agencies. More hands on deck from the city manager, more hands on deck from the public works director

Tila Duhaime: and police and fire and police and fire. We fund them and a large portion of their job is responding to these crashes.

So if we can redirect that to, a different way other than cleaning up the mess after the crash I think that’s a legitimate use of public funds.

Kevin Krizek: And so that’s what we have right now. We have draft 0.4 of a protocol that a community would adopt. It’s kind

Tila Duhaime: of hour by hour. Here’s what you do day, on day four, here’s what you would, check for.

So just walking them through, like Kevin said, doing their homework for them, walking them through what gets placed where for how long, what kind of signage and like public messaging, trying to make that as uniform as possible so that it becomes familiar to drivers just like school zone or work zone.

Kevin Krizek: Right now this is all [00:48:00] volunteer effort between and myself. And what we’re basically looking for funding is to look at how that protocol could be rolled out in a community and just ease the path.

Tila Duhaime: And we have that interest from a couple of communities in doing it. So we are in active conversations with a couple of them.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. If you’re on my side of the

Kevin Krizek: microphone, what would you ask yourself? If I were in your shoes, Jeff? I would ask how do you know that this is gonna work? The question is a good one because the response to that, having thought about this for almost 20 months. But that’s only in terms of the policy concept, it’s been more than that.

It’s been, multiple decades of my own educational upbringing, seeing the different sides of the coin, and then my professional time in Washington DC I. And we know that there are certain causes that are inherent in, like I said before, the system that we’ve accepted. And so that’s the science.

That’s the science behind why we think that this works. And so [00:49:00] this is something that I think bridges both advocacy and the science and how can we allow those who see it from only the scientific perspective. That is the transportation czars who really think that we need a lot of fast moving cars in our transportation system to ensure that our cities hum along.

That’s a limited view of accepting the core belief that road trauma is an acceptable byproduct of cities. I. Right, and so I would ask, those, how do we know that this is gonna work well? We know that this byproduct that we have been accepting should not be acceptable anymore. And we know that there are certain causes, there are certain fundamental inherent conditions that we can address.

Tila Duhaime: So I went to that crash scene, the one on Monday. I was there yesterday and I just pulled over to the side of the road and walked around and read some of the notes that had been left by her cheerleading team and the notes on the flowers. And [00:50:00] cars were, it’s a 45 mile an hour road. Cars regularly travel over 55 along it it’s at an intersection and I’d been there for a few minutes and then I heard someone calling out to me.

And he said ma’am, would you like a hug? And there was a man who had parked on the cross street also, pulled off on the side of the road and was approaching me and he said, Hey, I just saw you standing here. It’s really terrible. I saw this memorial here yesterday.

It’s awful. What’s happened? I just wondered if you would like a hug. And I said, of course, yes. Thank you for that. That’s very sweet. So we hugged and then he said, I’m sorry for your loss. And I said, oh, I didn’t know her. I said, I just work in, transportation policy and this kind of thing is, what gets me going and preventing the next one is what I’m hoping for.

And he didn’t know her either. He hadn’t heard any of the details, so I filled him in. I continue to believe that there are people, when I talk about the sort [00:51:00] of overtaking of American individualism and freedom and liberty, it’s painting American drivers as selfish, and I think that there is a way to appeal to their humanity by starting and having a good hard look at what we are doing to ourselves, what we are doing to our children.

I believe she was 17. That’s wrong, and I see that’s wrong and I don’t have to know her to know that’s wrong. And I think the better we paint a picture of the real impact that people are making with their driving decisions without blaming them, without putting them on the defensive. That’s why I think this really has some promise.

Jeff Wood: Where can folks find out more about what you’re working on, how to support you all, how to bring it to the attention of their city council or local officials that might be able to do something to implement this? [00:52:00]

Kevin Krizek: We’ve been rolling this out in dozens of communities, dozens of workshops, dozens of different venues over the past 15 months.

There’s no website yet, but the easiest way is to reach out personally to me and or Tila email is kj, KRIZ [email protected]. You can find me on the web and. Ask the question that you’re asking and we do a very good job of responding.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Kevin Krizek: And we are seeking recommendations from city council people who would like to learn more.

We’re happy to give them the time. Right now, we give them more than what they ask for. We give them a workshop, we give them a protocol, we give them everything that they wanna say to ease the process by which they can lean into this from their city. We have probably seven, eight different people who are, I wanna learn more, but it’s.

Hard for them to get the attention of their boss because their boss is already working 60 hours a week trying to solve all the other problems of the world. But I’m convinced that once [00:53:00] a Pittsburgh comes along and then a Tampa comes along, and then a Portland comes along, that there’s a snowball effect that can accumulate.

But what we are doing is empowering that first and second mover. So feel free to reach out to us directly.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Tila and Kevin, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Tila Duhaime: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure,

Kevin Krizek: Jeff. Thanks so much. It was great to be back and appreciate your questions.

I.